Today’s post kicks off a series of interviews I have planned for the Surly Muse blog. Christening this new feature is fellow writer and founder of #WritingEmpire, Angela Goff. Thanks, Angela! 1. When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Second grade was the turning point, when my teacher helped me assemble my [...]
A Jedi Like Your Father: What Luke Skywalker Taught Me about Writing Characters
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For the longest time, I struggled with strong character motivation. Still do, actually. Unless I make a conscious effort to do otherwise, I tend to write reactive characters to whom shit happens — who just sort of blunder from one encounter to another, maybe having an emotion or two about it, but with no all-consuming [...]
Resolving to Resolve Some Resolute Resolutions
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With the rapacious materialism of Christmas now behind us, thoughts turn to the new year, a time for new beginnings, fresh starts, and hoary clichés about new beginnings and fresh starts. Look at you, being reborn like a phoenix from the ashes as if you own the place. Why don’t you just turn over some [...]
Imperium Giveaway Results
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First of all, Merry Christmas to all my readers and the great writers and readers I’ve connected with on social media. You guys rock and have made a good year great. Second, today is the day of the Imperium giveaway. I rolled the dice like a good gamer ought to, and the winners came out: [...]
[Guest Post] Every Reader Matters
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Today’s post on the value of readership comes from Avalon Jaedra at Writability. Thanks, AvaJae! It wasn’t long after I jumped into the blogosphere that I realized blogging is very much about the numbers. The number of pageviews, the number of subscribers, the number of blog posts and comments and retweets and inbound and outbound [...]
Book Review and Giveaway: Imperium (Nicholas Olivo)
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Since purchasing my Kindle, I’ve been consuming a steady diet of books by indie authors (in between heaping helpings of Steven Erikson’s Malazan series). As with traditionally published books, results have been mixed – a couple of turkeys, some serviceable-yet-forgettable first efforts — and then there’s Nicholas Olivo’s Imperium, which made me an instant fan. [...]
Box Set Recollections
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I imagine every writer has one indelible moment that defined their reading lives — a single book or reading experience that eclipses all the rest and becomes the moment of “that’s when I knew.” For me, that moment was my twelfth Christmas, when my mom bought me the Foundation Trilogy box set. I hadn’t yet [...]
A (Digital) Room of One’s Own
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My desk. Yes, those are rubber ducks. I love seeing people’s writing spaces. From the tidy and well-organized desk to the unruly pile of papers around an overstuffed chair, the writing space can be a great insight into the writer’s mind — and sometimes it’s just fun to see what other people stock their desks [...]
[Guest Post] Your Workshop Story Is Probably Shit
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Today’s incendiary guest post comes from Tracy McCusker, former editor, published poet, and avowed pottymouth. There’s a certain kind of story that can be found hanging around self-published short story collections and small-press slush piles. This kind of story has a certain whiff about it. It’s verbose. It’s stylized. It’s littered with impossibly academic sentences. [...]
What You Leave Behind
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This is a response to “All the Things,” a blog post by Random9q, which is in turn a response to Bullish Ink‘s guest post from earlier this week. Lately with this blog, I’ve aspired to be either pedagogical or humorous — optimally, both at the same time. This entry is a bit more personal — [...]
